The French embassy in the United States announced Thursday the unprecedented launch of a “La Fayette” scholarship to finance the reception of 30 American students each year in French universities or schools of excellence in order to “develop lasting links between the United States and France”.
The French shipowner CMA CGM is the “founding patron” of this program launched on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the United States, with an annual cost of 1.5 million euros per year, Mohamed Bouabdallah, director of the Villa Albertine, institute for culture and education of the French embassy in the United States, told AFP.
“The first promotion which has just arrived in France comes from 3,400 application files submitted and selected by a jury chaired by Nobel Prize winner Esther Duflo,” said Mr. Bouabdallah.
Other donors such as the Carnegie Foundation and individual tech entrepreneurs have invested in the fund opened by the Villa Albertine for this 30 million euro program, inspired by the model of the Rhodes University Scholarship at Oxford, he added.
The interest generated by the fund will finance the stay of 30 students each year accompanied by a program of meetings, visits and experiences in France, intended to “bring out a new generation of Francophile Americans,” Mr. Bouabdallah said.
“France did not have a talent detection and recruitment program in the United States and the number of students in France was collapsing,” he explained.
In 2024-25, France welcomed 6,381 American students according to Campus France, 5% less than in 2022.
The first 30 scholarship holders, who arrived at the beginning of July, were received on Thursday in Marseille (south) at the headquarters of CMA CGM, in its Tangram innovation and training center. They come from “Ivy League” universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, as well as from the University of Kalamazoo (Michigan), that of Arkansas, Mississippi, Minnesota, Texas, Virginia and Kansas.
They are enrolled in Masters courses in Parisian institutions such as Sciences Po Paris (Climate school), the École des Chartes, Polytechnique, HEC or Paris-Saclay, and in the universities of Aix-Marseille, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Lyon, Strasbourg, and Toulouse (Supaero and TSE).
The next class for the 2027 school year will be selected between September 4 and December 1 based on applications submitted on the website lafayette.villalabertine.org.
